Introduction to Solid State Physics

Introduction to Solid State Physics

File:Introduction to Solid State Physics.jpg Second edition (1956)
Author	Charles Kittel
Language	English
Subject	Condensed matter physics Solid state physics
Publisher	John Wiley and Sons
Publication date	1953 (1st ed.)
Publication place	United States
Pages	396 (1st ed.) 680 (8th ed.)
ISBN
OCLC	787838554
Dewey Decimal	530.4
LC Class	QC176.K5
Identifiers refer to the 8th edition of the book, printed in 2005, unless otherwise noted

Introduction to Solid State Physics, known colloquially as Kittel, is a classic condensed matter physics textbook written by American physicist Charles Kittel in 1953. The book has been highly influential and has seen widespread adoption; Marvin L. Cohen remarked in 2019 that Kittel's content choices in the original edition played a large role in defining the field of solid-state physics. It was also the first proper textbook covering this new field of physics. The book is published by John Wiley and Sons and, as of 2018, it is in its ninth edition and has been reprinted many times as well as translated into over a dozen languages, including Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. In some later editions, the eighteenth chapter, titled Nanostructures, was written by Paul McEuen. Along with its competitor Ashcroft and Mermin, the book is considered a standard textbook in condensed matter physics.

Background

Kittel received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1941 under his advisor Gregory Breit. Before being promoted to professor of physics at UC Berkeley in 1951, Kittel held several other positions. He worked for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory from 1940 to 1942, was a research physicist in the US Navy until 1945, worked at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT from 1945 to 1947 and at Bell Labs from 1947 to 1951, and was a visiting associate professor at UC Berkeley from 1950 until his promotion.

Henry Ehrenreich has noted that before the first edition of Introduction to Solid State Physics came out in 1953, there were no other textbooks on the subject; rather, the young field's study material was spread across several prominent articles and treatises. The field of solid state physics was very new at the time of writing and was defined by only a few treatises that, in the Ehrenreich's view, expounded rather than explained the topics and were not suitable as textbooks.

Content

The book covers a wide range of topics in solid state physics, including Bloch's theorem, crystals, magnetism, phonons, Fermi gases, magnetic resonance, and surface physics. The chapters are broken into sections that highlight the topics.

Table of contents (8th ed.)
Chapter	Title	Topics
1	Crystal Structure	Crystal structure
2	Wave Diffraction and the Reciprocal Lattice	diffraction, Bragg Law, Fourier analysis, reciprocal lattice vectors, Laue equations, Brillouin zone, atomic form factor
3	Crystal Binding and Elastic Constants	Van der Waals force, Ionic crystals, covalent crystals, metals
4	Phonons I. Crystal Vibrations	phonons
5	Phonons II. Thermal Properties	phonons
6	Free Electron Fermi Gas	Fermi gas, free electron model
7	Energy Bands	nearly free electron model, Bloch's theorem, Kronig-Penney model, crystal momentum
8	Semiconductor Crystals	band gap, electron holes, semimetals, superlattices
9	Fermi Surfaces and Metals	Fermi surfaces
10	Superconductivity	superconductivity, BCS theory, superconductors
11	Diamagnetism and Paramagnetism	diamagnetism and paramagnetism
12	Ferromagnetism and Antiferromagnetism	ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism
13	Magnetic Resonance	magnetic resonance
14	Plasmons, Polaritons, and Polarons	plasmons, polaritons, polarons
15	Optical Processes and Excitons	excitons, Kramers-Kronig relations
16	Dielectrics And Ferroelectrics	Maxwell equations in matter
17	Surface and Interface Physics	surface physics
18	Nanostructures (by Paul McEuen)	electron microscopy, optical microscopy
19	Noncrystalline Solids	glasses
20	Point Defects	lattice defects
21	Dislocations	shear strength of crystals, dislocations, hardness of materials
22	Alloys	Hume-Rothery rules, electrical conductivity, Kondo effect

Reception

Marvin L. Cohen and Morrel H. Cohen, in an obituary for Kittel in 2019, remarked that the original book "was not only the dominant text for teaching in the field, it was on the bookshelf of researchers in academia and industry throughout the world", though they did not provide any time frame on when it may have been surpassed as the dominant text. They also noted that Kittel's content choices played a large role in defining the field of solid-state physics.

The book is a classic textbook in the subject and has seen use as a comparative benchmark in the reviews of other books in condensed matter physics. In a 1969 review of another book, Robert G. Chambers noted that there were not many textbooks covering these topics, as "since 1953, Kittel's classic Introduction to Solid State Physics has dominated the field so effectively that few competitors have appeared", noting that the third edition continues that legacy. Before continuing, the reviewer noted that the book was too long for some uses and that less thorough works would be welcome.

• Several notable reviews of the first edition were published in 1954, including Arthur James Cochran Wilson, Leslie Fleetwood Bates, and Kenneth Standley, among others.
• Gwyn Owain Jones reviewed the book in 1955.
• The second edition of the book was reviewed by Robert W. Hellwarth in 1957 and Leslie Fleetwood Bates, among others.
• The third edition of the book also received reviews, including one by Donald F. Holcomb.
• A German translation of the book has also received several reviews.

Publication history

Reprints

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by editing the page to add missing items, with references to reliable sources.

Foreign translations

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by editing the page to add missing items, with references to reliable sources.

Language	Title	Translators	Year	Publisher	Location	Identifiers
Spanish			1965	Reverte	Barcelona	OCLC 1097704401
Hungarian		Ferenc Kedves	1966	Műszaki Kiadó	Budapest	OCLC 895275633
Arabic		Mahmūd Mukhtār	1968	Maktabat al-Nahdah al-Misriyah nushir haḍa al-kitạb maʻah muassasat Frankilīn; Mūassasat Frankilīn	al-Qāhirah; al-Qāhirah; New York	OCLC 18156712
Japanese		良清 宇野	1968	丸善	Tokyo	OCLC 673599602
Romanian		Anatolie Hristev; Cornelia C. Rusu	1972	Editura Tehnică	Bucureşti	OCLC 895553854
French		Alain Honnart	1972	Dunod	Paris	OCLC 25192813
Japanese			1974	丸善	Tokyo	OCLC 33543405
Russian		A. A Gusev	1978	"Nauka", Glav. red. fiziko-matematicheskoĭ lit-ry	Moskva	OCLC 22540726
Japanese		Ryōsei Uno	1978	丸善	Tōkyō	OCLC 47405134
Modern Greek		C. Papageorgopoulos	1976	G. Pneumatikou	Athēna	OCLC 21774626
Chinese		翁上林	1979	臺北市徐氏基金會	臺北市	OCLC 681443056
Spanish		Serna Alcaraz, J., Serna Alcaraz, C. R., Piqueras de Noriega, J.	1981	Reverté	Barcelona	OCLC 46327300
Czech		Miloš Matyáš	1985	Academia	Praha	OCLC 39420310
Japanese		Uno, Ryōsei., 宇野, 良清	1988	丸善		OCLC 673243413
Malay		Khiruddin Abdullah; Karsono Ahmad Dasuki	1995	Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia	Pulau Pinang	OCLC 850076803
Korean		U, Chong-ch'ŏn., 우종천.	1997	Pŏmhan Sŏjok Chusik Hoesa	Sŏul	OCLC 38038777
Japanese		Ryōsei Uno, 良清 宇野	1998	Maruzen	Tōkyō	OCLC 38943576
Polish		Wiesława Korczak	1999	Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN	Warszawa	OCLC 41259843
Japanese		Uno, Ryōsei., Tsuya, Noboru., Niizeki, Komajirō., 宇野, 良清, 津屋, 昇	2005	Maruzen	Tōkyō	OCLC 676541713
German		Siegfried Hunklinger	2005	München Wien Oldenbourg	München	OCLC 163412454
Chinese		Hong, Lian-hui (wu li xue), Liu, Li-ji., Wei, Rong-jun., Kittel, Charles, 1916-, 洪連輝 (物理學), 劉立基.	2006	Gao li	Tai bei xian wu gu xiang	OCLC 176861489
French		Paul McEuen	2007	Dunod	Paris	OCLC 213053150
Italian		Ennio Bonetti; Carlo Bottani; Franco Ciccacci	2008	C.E.A.	Milano	OCLC 860462787
Turkish		Gülsen Önengüt; Demir Önengüt; H İbrahim Somyürek	2014	Palme Yayıncılık	Ankara	OCLC 949367956
Spanish		J. Anguilar Peris; J. de la Rubia Pacheco	2018	Reverté	Barcelona	OCLC 1083203050
Korean		Ujongcheon., Sin, Seongcheol., Yu, Geonho., I, Seongik., I, Jaeil.	2019	Tekseuteu Bukseu	Seoul	OCLC 1128665713
Polish		Wiesława Korczak; Tadeusz Skośkiewicz; Andrzej Wiśniewski; Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN	2012	Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN	Warszawa	OCLC 803803518

See also

• List of textbooks on classical mechanics and quantum mechanics
• List of textbooks in electromagnetism